LOS ANGELES, CA --(May 3, 2000) -- CBS affiliate WSPA-TV (Spartanburg, SC), a recent addition to the Media General, Inc. station group, has bought an array of Panasonic DVCPRO equipment to support its conversion to digital news operations. The 65-piece DVCPRO purchase, valued at $870,000, includes 19 fully-equipped AJ-D810A 2/3" 3-CCD camcorders, 29 AJ-D450 studio editing VTRs, 11 AJ-D850 editing VTRs, five AJ-D230H desktop VTRs and an all-in-one AJ-LT85 laptop editor, plus 12 AG-A850 multi-event edit controllers and 38 Panasonic color monitors. Media General maintains a strong local news presence throughout the Southeast United States, with newspapers in many markets in addition to its 26 broadcast holdings, predominantly NBC and CBS affiliates.

Last year, Media General, Inc. (Tampa, FL) announced a multi-million dollar, multi-year agreement to standardize all of its owned television stations on Panasonic DVCPRO50/DVCPRO equipment; WSPA-TV is the most recent station to upgrade from Beta to DVCPRO. The station produces 21 1/2 hours of local news each week. Ron Peeler, Chief Engineer, WSPA, said, "Our Beta equipment was getting long in the tooth, and we'd been planning our move into digital newsgathering even prior to our sale to Media General earlier this spring. Media General's consolidated resources and track record with Panasonic sealed the decision to go with DVCPRO."

Peeler explained that all of the station's news/sports photographers will be equipped with AJ-D810A camcorders. The AJ-D850 studio VTRs, with front-panel editing controls, will be used to record news feeds, for on-air playback, and placed both in master control and in one linear edit suite. The AJ-D450 VTRs will be used for cuts editing at the station and its four news bureaus, in Columbia, Greenwood, Anderson and Greenville, SC. AJ-D450s will also be installed in the station's live trucks and satellite truck.

"We're very excited about the AJ-LT85's mobile editing capabilities," he added. "Throughout the football season, we cover up to 15 high school teams every Friday night, and the laptop editor will allows us to do 'field-to-field' edits, a big efficiency boost. The laptop will be much easier to ship on planes, and we can use it as an additional edit bay in a crunch."

Peeler said that the station has begun to take delivery of the DVCPRO equipment, and plans to go on-air with it shortly after May sweeps. Panasonic's Emmy Award-winning DVCPRO format is the industry's standard for digital acquisition and recording, and the most rapidly adopted professional video format in history. More than 115,000 units are in use worldwide, and in the U.S., over 700 stations rely on DVCPRO daily for news, features, creative services, deep archiving and more.

From 480 interlace to HDTV, DVCPRO has ENG, EFP and studio production tools within a single extensible format - from 25Mbps DVCPRO to 50Mbps DVCPRO50 and DVCPRO50 Progressive to 100Mbps DVCPRO HD. DVCPRO is tailor-made for the industry's stated requirements -- cost-effective, intra-frame only compression and scalable resolution, 25Mbps for news, 50Mbps for studio use and, now available, 100Mbps for HDTV applications.

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